From the time when Southeast Asia first rose above their horizon, Europeans—the infinitesimal number of them who cared about such matters, that is—tended to treat that vague and insubstantial region beneath the sunrise as simply a more distant part of India. This practice went back at least to Claudius Ptolemy or, possibly, one of his redactors, who subsumed a good part of the region under the rubric “Trans-Gangetic India.” Subsequently the whole area came to be identified with one of the “Three Indies,” though whether India Major or Minor, Greater or Lesser, Superior or Inferior, seems, often to have been a personal preference of the author concerned. When Europeans began to penetrate into Southeast Asia in earnest, they continued this tradition, attaching to various of the constituent territories such labels as Further India or Hinterindien, the East Indies, the Indian Archipelago, Insulinde, and, in acknowledgment of the presence of a competing culture, Indochina. As recently as 1884, a German ethnographer saw nothing incongruous in designating the archipelago as “the Indian Islands,” a term that with the cultural predilection of his age, he Hellenized as Indonesia. Although the powerful and pervasive influence of the “most divine and wise Ptolemy” furnished impeccable authority for this nomenclature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is no doubt that the practice also signified the recognition of South Asian cultural forms and institutions in the lands beyond the Bay of Bengal. Despite these forms differing subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—from those in India proper, they were so conspicuous that it was readily inferred, given the intellectual predisposition of the day, that they were the result of Indian colonization, if not conquest, in ancient times.

The years from 1919 through 1921 represent a period of major change in the political views of Mao. At the outset, he was attracted to anarchism and liberalism. At the end, he was prepared to espouse Marxism-Leninism, not because he had encompassed its doctrines, but because he had been persuaded that it represented a technique for successful revolution. In these years, Mao began as a strong Han nationalist but later denounced Chinese “imperialism” and argued for a Hunan nation. A few months later, he was espousing internationalism. Underlying these changes was the alternate hope and despair that Mao felt for China as a nation. A deep-rooted Chineseness and a penchant for political activism characterized Mao throughout this and succeeding eras.

This article critiques the HIID-KDI eight-volume Studies in the Modernization of the Republic of Korea from the perspective of Korean studies. The Studies' critical contributions to the field are the comprehensiveness of treatment, wealth of data, and disciplinary sophistication of the analyses they present of the principal economic and demographic phenomena of Korea's development after the Korean War and especially after 1961. The overall weakness of the Studies is their inadequate treatment of Korean history, culture, and society in relation to development, despite their great emphasis on the developmental importance of certain cultural phenomena in Korea. Their usefulness, both from the perspective of development studies and from the perspective of Korean studies, would have been enhanced by examining additional questions concerning industrial organization, labor, and the role of the military, as well as by more thorough and knowledgeable analysis of the historical, cultural, and social basis of Korea's modern development.

The Harvard University–Korea Development Institute eight-volume study of Korean economic development from 1945 to 1975 represents what is probably the single most comprehensive attempt to document economic change in a developing society. Although the volumes concentrate on economics, important omissions are evident, most of them because of the dearth of contributions from noneconomic social scientists and the orientations of the sponsoring institutions. Donors may be strongly tempted to view Korea as a development model, but a variety of internal and external factors make this approach inappropriate.

The author reviews a number of books dealing with economic development in South Asia. He discusses the fact that, although there have been three decades of sophisticated approaches to economic growth in South Asia, mass poverty remains entrenched. He attempts to account for the striking difference between the economic growth of East Asia and that of South Asia.